Skylake QA Drove Apple Away
Dave James (via Slashdot, MacRumors):
The “bad quality assurance of Skylake” was responsible for Apple finally making the decision to ditch Intel and focus on its own ARM-based processors for high-performance machines. That’s the claim made by outspoken former Intel principal engineer, François Piednoël.
[…]
“The quality assurance of Skylake was more than a problem,” says Piednoël during a casual Xplane chat and stream session. “It was abnormally bad. We were getting way too much citing for little things inside Skylake. Basically our buddies at Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture. And that went really, really bad.
“When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you’re not leading into the right place.”
Previously:
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My 2015 iMac Retina 27" runs Skylake, and has always been buggy.
My theory is that Apple was building a bunch of internal QA tools for their own processors and then started applying them to Skylake and therefore were able to file all these bugs?
"When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you’re not leading into the right place."
Now follow that line of thought and substitute Apple's customers for Intel's, and Apple software QA for Intel's hardware QA.